Coming Soon: the Laptop You Power by Typing

Solar powered laptops are barely here, and — if the hype is to be believed — already headed for obsolescence.
Why so?  Because a team of researchers at Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) have successfully demonstrated a new, “nano-scaled” piezoelectric film’s capacity for turning mechanical pressure into electricity — bringing the (admittedly geeky) dream of perpetually-charged laptop batteries one giant leap closer to reality.
“Piezoelectricity“, as a phenomenon, was discovered in the 19th century and is currently employed in things like electric cigarette lighters.  Piezoelectric materials (like crystals or ceramics) have been studied thoroughly over the last century, but research on thin films is relatively new, according to the team’s research lead, Dr. Madhu Bhaskaran. HP pavilion ze4935ea ac adapter ”Our study focused on thin film coatings, because we believe they hold the only practical possibility of integrating piezoelectrics into existing electronic technology,” she explains.  Dr. Bhaskaran hopes to implement her research findings into consumer electronic form factors on a wide scale — but doesn’t stop there.  ”The power of piezoelectrics could be integrated into running shoes to charge mobile phones, enable laptops to be powered through typing or even used to convert blood pressure into a power source for pacemakers — essentially creating an everlasting TOSHIBA satellite pro a60 battery .”
Now that the experimental films have proven to produce quantifiable electricity, the only road-blocks to industry acceptance will likely come from the material’s initial cost and resistance from the manufacturers of conventional “rare-Earth” dell xps m1330 battery packs.

 

John 1 week ago

No. No, no, no, no, NO!

First, Dr Bhaskaran has not invented a product for charging laptops or anything else. What she has done is develop a nanoindentation technique to assist in the characterisation of thin piezoelectric films. No doubt this is very useful research, but it is nowhere near being a product hp pavilion dv6000 battery.

Next, a typical keyboard key force is 45g and key travel is about 3.5mm. The energy from a single key press is therefore F x s = 1.5mJ. My laptop is currently consuming about 15W. Therefore, assuming all the energy from each keystroke is converted into useful power, which it can’t, I would need to average 10,000 key strokes per second. I can’t type that fast.

Even with reduced power consumption and stiffer keys with greater travel, it is clear from this simple sum that this is several orders of magnitude away from a feasible invention.

For example, if the keys had 35mm of travel and required a key force of 450g (i.e. about one pound-force), and the laptop used only 1.5W, it would require ‘only’ 10 keystrokes per second, still assuming no losses. But at 1.5W, my existing dell inspiron 1545 battery would last 40 hours instead of 4.

The energy harvested from the environment (after all the losses) must exceed the power consumption of the device.

Many energy harvesting ideas fail as soon as this basic arithmetic is done. Too often there is simply not enough energy in the environment available to be harvested. If there were, the world would be unbearably noisy, shaky, lossy, windy, hot, bright or whatever.

Reducing the device power consumption of course reduces the energy that needs to be harvested. However, this then makes it easier to achieve acceptable life from dell xps m1710 ac adapter battery. Thus there is a rather narrow window of opportunity for energy harvesting where it is not more cost effective, compact and reliable to use Dell studio 1737 ac adapter batteries instead.

I am not against energy harvesting in principle. Sometimes there are reasons why energy cannot be stored (e.g. plants that are subject to explosive atmosphere regulations) and HP pavilion dv8000 battery changing or charging is difficult, that create an overwhelming case for energy harvesting.

There are some good products where energy harvesting works well: PV powered calculators, torches with solar battery chargers, bike lights with dynamos, where the power requirements and duty cycle match the available energy. But in practice, good opportunities are scarce and most do not stand up even to basic engineering scrutiny. Like this one.

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ZShahan3 1 week ago in reply to John

Wow, that looks like a pretty powerful debunking of its usefulness & promise
(unless i am missing something). Thank you for that.

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Jo Borras liked this

Jo Borras 1 week ago in reply to ZShahan3

I think what you're missing is that power consumption of laptops is dropping with new display technology, and that "laptop" doesn't necessarily equate to "2GHz processor w/ 2GB RAM ..." etc., and could well mean E-Ink display running a simplified Linux/Chrome OS with drastically reduced power consumption compared to current "overkill" devices. (HP pavilion zd7000 battery )

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Jo Borras 1 week ago in reply to John

VERY well-said and a thorough deep-dive into some of the maths involved, but I think you're overstating the power requirements of a usable device. The latest E-ink devices, for example, are certainly proving their use in a number of Android and e-reader systems, and measure power usage in millivolts, which would certainly change the equation, I would think (though, I could be wrong).(Sony pcga-bp3t battery)

I'm thinking this would be less a conventional laptop and more of an e-ink device that could also save word processing documents, spreadsheets, etc., and serve primarily as an e-reader/commuter tool that's a little more type-friendly than the current generation of eReaders and iPads.

What do you think?

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